How to do a media consumption analysis?
A man who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary — Lucius Annaeus Seneca
I am planning to write a highly personal opinion blog that I have with regard to life, productivity and some other things once a week.
I want this to be a chill way to start the weekend.
So here it goes:
Have you ever done a media consumption analysis?
So it’s basically understanding what are the things that you are watching or engaging with every single day on any mobile or screen-related endpoint — This is my definition.
So I am writing this blog for those people who want to do a specific thing in their life.
For me, it’s a road to being a solopreneur.
I was an entrepreneur previously. I had a team producing videos for my clients from 2018 to 2021.
After that, I jumped to corporate for a few personal reasons.
Managing people has a few perks; sometimes it can be fun and engaging.
But when you become exhausted at some point and become an introvert all of a sudden it’s a bit tough.
Anyways, enough of my rambling let’s get down to business.
How I did my media consumption:
So my “specific thing” is to become a solopreneur.
In that case, I looked at my existing media consumption activities.
I wrote down a list of Media that I consume all day including my 9 to 6 day job.
And then I looked at each of my media apps to understand how much time I spend on there.
Note: I am working as a social media marketing specialist in a Saas company so I have to be really careful filtering the time out. The time spent on unwanted media consumption and the time spent on research.
After an analysis of my apps, this is what I found.
The next step is I wanted to understand what are all my preferences in each of my social media apps or any other media app.
I’ll share the screenshots of my Instagram feed because that’s the app I spent my unwanted time learning nothing except getting anxious.
You have to understand something really important here.
The algorithm of all the media apps on your mobile only favours what you want.
If you are looking at news about the recession, crime, cinema etc.
Media apps will feed you with all of that.
As you can see my feed was all of that.
The reason you should do this media consumption is because you are sub-merging yourselves in things that you don’t even want to without knowing that yourself.
I tried my best to change my Instagram algorithm to talk about things like Solopreneurship, No code or podcast best practices etc.
But all I got was the same zero valuable posts which just kept hyping unwanted things.
So I uninstalled it.
So that’s basically the third step after finishing up the timing and algorithm analysis to try to change the algorithm.
I achieved this in my YouTube, Medium, LinkedIn and Twitter (X).
All you need to do is engage with the content that you want to see.
For me in the case of solopreneurship, no code or productivity I just went on to like these below accounts and comment on them whenever I see them on my feed or while scrolling.
For the posts which you don’t want to see you can go to the top 3 bullet icons and choose “don’t recommend this channel.”
A few channel types that I ignored were — conspiracy theories, world violence, negative hooks etc.
See if you are in that industry that’s fine you don’t need to do this stuff.
But for people like me who are reading this, you might feel like by seeing these things you are contributing something to the world or knowing these will make you more interesting.
Harsh Truth — It won’t.
The more you indulge in content that resonates with your ideology the more you become that person and you’ll meet people in that field eventually.
So to summarize the steps:
How to identify do you need a media consumption analysis?
Sometimes you’ll feel like “Okay I am consuming all this content but I feel it’s valuable to me and I think it’s worth it.”
Me: If it’s working out then good for me
But how did you know that it’s actually valuable or worth your time?
Let’s take the solopreneur concept as an example.
I consume all this content and I want to know if it’s worthwhile for me.
So I downloaded an app called Daylio.
Note: I am in no way affiliated with this app. Just sharing tools that will help your life like it’s doing mine now.
This is basically a mood-tracking app. I downloaded this after watching a video of Matt D’avella.
After downloading the app I noted down how I feel every single day and let me tell you this the times whenever I check my Instagram before going to sleep and I noted my mood in Daylio it was always on the bad side.
I’ll share a screenshot of how my mood was after I implemented the Media Consumption Analysis.
You can see a few downward trends that were me going through a breakup and if I had my Instagram and other social platforms (unwanted) on my phone you would have seen a flatline.
I am sure some might suggest I should get therapy because I am allowing my feelings to be influenced by an app.
And it’s true to some extent.
But in my opinion when you have an option to just uninstall and remove something from your life why go for a bigger option?
I always tell myself,
For a problem that can be solved by $5 you need to think just for that and not for $500. It’s not worth it.
Another way to find is
Implementing Dan Koe’s Power Planner:
Again no way I am affiliated just sharing my thoughts and workflows.
If you go to his website you can download this template for free and it’s really useful to get a prospective and retrospective view of what we have done so far.
Full honesty I just downloaded this morning and this was something I really needed.
There are obviously much more detailed templates out there but for me I needed something really simple that I can implement and especially to visualize.
You’ll have 4 different templates:
Quarterly
Monthly
Weekly
Daily
Try to be as detailed as possible and compare every day then come to a conclusion.
You: What if you are wrong Jeffrey?
To be honest I am not trying to prove anything here. In any part of life, there is no correct way or a fixed way of doing things.
I always encourage people to overcome the status quo and find new ways to achieve something.
So if I am wrong here i.e. — You are consuming content which isn’t required and still achieving your own definition of success well and well.
You are already in a happy place.
For the people who are confused, take these steps and if it is proven to be helpful please leave a comment below.
I would be happy even if it has helped just one person.
Happy Weekend (Almost) Folks.
To learn more about Future Tech, make sure to follow.
My Blog — Future technology simplified to read and implement.
My LinkedIn — Short form opinions on future tech.
